straight to the Zeb for psychiatric testing. And try to convince him to come clean on this—okay? It’s not just for me, it’s for him too. We break this case and find out he’s involved, nobody’s going to go easy on him. We don’t give out rain checks.”
“Not even for dinner?” Jilly asked brightly, happy now that she knew Zinc was getting out.
“What do you mean?”
Jilly grabbed a pencil and paper from his desk and scrawled “Jilly Coppercorn owes Hotshot Lou one dinner, restaurant of her choice,” and passed it over to him.
“I think they call this a bribe,” he said.
“I call it keeping in touch with your friends,” Jilly replied and gave him a big grin.
Lou glanced at Sue and rolled his eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m the sane one here.”
“You wish,” Jilly told her.
Lou heaved himself to his feet with exaggerated weariness. “C’mon, let’s get your friend out of here before he decides to sue us because we don’t have our coffee flown in from the Twilight Zone,” he said as he led the way down to the holding cells.
Zinc had the look of a street kid about two days away from a good meal. His jeans, Tshirt, and cotton jacket were ragged, but clean; his hair was a badly mown lawn, with tufts standing up here and there like exclamation points. The pupils of his dark brown eyes seemed too large for someone who never did drugs. He was seventeen, but acted half his age.
The only home he had was a squat in Upper Foxville that he shared with a couple of performance artists, so that was where Jilly and Sue took him in Sue’s Mazda. The living space he shared with the artists was on the upper story of a deserted tenement where someone had put together a makeshift loft by the simple method of removing all the walls, leaving a large empty area cluttered only by support pillars and the squatters’ belongings.
Lucia and Ursula were there when they arrived, practicing one of their pieces to the accompaniment of a ghetto blaster pumping out a mixture of electronic music and the sound of breaking glass at a barely audible volume. Lucia was wrapped in plastic and lying on the floor, her black hair spread out in an arc around her head. Every few moments one of her limbs would twitch, the plastic wrap stretching tight against her skin with the movement. Ursula crouched beside the blaster, chanting a poem that consisted only ofthe line, “There are no patterns.” She’d shaved her head since the last time Jilly had seen her.
“What am I doing here?” Sue asked softly. She made no effort to keep the look of astonishment from her features.
“Seeing how the other half lives,” Jilly said as she led the way across the loft to where Zinc’s junkyard of belongings took up a good third of the available space.
“But just look at this stuff,” Sue said. “And how did he get that in here?”
She pointed to a Volkswagen bug that was sitting up on blocks, missing only its wheels and front hood. Scattered all around it was a hodgepodge of metal scraps, old furniture, boxes filled with wiring and God only knew what.
“Piece by piece,” Jilly told her.
“And then he reassembled it here?”
Jilly nodded.
“Okay. I’ll bite. Why?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
Jilly grinned as Sue quickly shook her head. During the entire trip from the precinct station, Zinc had carefully explained his theory of the world to her, how the planet Earth was actually an asylum for insane aliens, and that was why nothing made sense.
Zinc followed the pair of them across the room, stopping only long enough to greet his squatmates.
“Hi, Luce. Hi, Urse.” Lucia never looked at him.
“There are no patterns,” Ursula said.
Zinc nodded thoughtfully.
“Maybe there’s a pattern in that,” Sue offered.
“Don’t start,” Jilly said. She turned to Zinc. “Are you going to be all right?”
“You should’ve seen them go, Jill,” Zinc said. “All shiny and wet, just whizzing down the street, heading for the hills.”
“I’m sure it was really something, but you’ve got to promise me to stay off the streets for awhile. Will you do that, Zinc? At least until they catch this gang of bike thieves?”
“But there weren’t any thieves. It’s like I told Elvis Two, they left on their own.”
Sue gave him an odd look. “Elvis too?”
“Don’t ask,” Jilly said. She touched Zinc’s arm. “Just stay in for awhile—okay? Let the bikes take off on their own.”
“But I like to watch them go.”
“Do it as a favor to me, would you?”
“I’ll try.”
Jilly gave him a quick smile. “Thanks. Is there anything you need? Do you need money for some food?”
Zinc shook his head. Jilly gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and tousled the exclamation point hair tufts sticking up from his head.
“I’ll drop by to see you tomorrow, then—okay?” At his nod, Jilly started back across the room.
“C’mon, Sue,” she said when her companion paused beside the tape machine where Ursula was still chanting.
“So what about this stock market stuff?” she asked the poet. “There are no patterns,” Ursula said.
“That’s what I thought,” Sue said, but then Jilly was tugging her arm.
“Couldn’t resist, could you?” Jilly said.
Sue just grinned.
“Why do you humor him?” Sue asked when she pulled up in front of July’s loft.
“What makes you think I am?”
“I’m being serious, Jilly.”
“So am I. He believes in what he’s talking about. That’s good enough for me.”
“But all this stuff he goes on about ... Elvis clones and insane aliens—”
“Don’t forget animated bicycles.”
Sue gave Jilly a pained look. “I’m not. That’s just what I mean—it’s all so crazy.”
“What if it’s not?”
Sue shook her head. “I can’t buy it.”
“It’s not hurting anybody.” Jilly leaned over and gave Sue a quick kiss on the cheek. “Gotta run.
Thanks for everything.”
“Maybe it’s hurting him,” Sue said as Jilly opened the door to get out. “Maybe it’s closing the door on any chance he has of living a normal life. You know—opportunity comes knocking, but there’s nobody home? He’s not just eccentric, Jilly. He’s crazy.”
Jilly sighed. “His mother was a hooker, Sue. The reason he’s a little flaky is her pimp threw him down two flights of stairs when he was six years old—not because Zinc did anything, or because his mother didn’t trick enough johns that night, but just because the creep felt like doing it. That’s what normal was for Zinc. He’s happy now—a lot happier than when Social Services tried to put him in a foster home where they only wanted him for the support check they got once a month for taking him in.
And a lot happier than he’d be in the Zeb, all doped up or sitting around in a padded cell whenever he tried to tell people about the things he sees.
“He’s got his own life now. It’s not much—not by your stan—
dards, maybe not even by mine, but it’s his and I don’t want anybody to take it away from him.”
“But—”
“I know you mean well,” Jilly said, “but things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to.
Nobody’s got time for a kid like Zinc in Social Services. There he’s just a statistic that they shuffle around with all the rest of their files and red tape. Out here on the street, we’ve got a system that works.
